Watch TVO’s “The Agenda with Steve Paikin” Monday, September 16 8 or 11 PM, 2024 — AODA Alliance Chair Interviewed on Memoir of the 1980 Battle to Get Disability Rights Added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update

United for a Barrier-Free Ontario for All People with Disabilities

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Watch TVO’s “The Agenda with Steve Paikin” Monday, September 16 at 8 or 11 PM, 2024 — AODA Alliance Chair Interviewed on Memoir of the 1980 Battle to Get Disability Rights Added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

September 14, 2024

How did disability rights get added to the Charter of Rights in 1980? Those rights are the underpinning of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.

On Monday, September 16, 2024, at 8 and 11 pm EDT, watch TVO’s flagship current affairs program “The Agenda with Steve Paikin” to find out. It will also stream live on the X (previously Twitter) feed and Facebook page of “The Agenda with Steve Paikin”.

This 26-minute interview will be permanently available on The Agenda’s YouTube channel within a few hours after it airs, if not immediately. We will publicize the YouTube link once we get it. In the past, captions have been added shortly after the broadcast.

How did Canada end up being the first of any western democracy to enact a constitutional guarantee of equality rights for people with disabilities? A new memoir tells the saga of how this uphill battle was won despite enormous obstacles. It is written by blind lawyer and law professor David Lepofsky, one of the grassroots disability activists who took part in the campaign over four decades ago to win this ground-breaking constitutional right.

This is the first retrospective to describe in detail the origin of the disability amendment to the Charter. It is a behind-the-scenes account of disability rights advocacy. Its story resonates to this day for millions of people with disabilities in Canada.

In October 1980, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau proposed a new Charter of Rights for Canada’s Constitution to guarantee equality rights. Yet originally, it entirely left out equality for people with disabilities. It was a blitz of grassroots activism that led Parliament to amend the proposed Charter before it was enacted to include equality for people with disabilities.

In “Swimming Up Niagara Falls — The Battle to Get Disability Rights Added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” David Lepofsky explains how it happened, step by step. This memoir includes a foreword by internationally renowned retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Rosalie Abella.

The disability amendment to Canada’s Constitution laid the bedrock legal foundation for court cases and legislative reforms to advance the right of students with disabilities to an equal education, the right of patients with disabilities to barrier-free access to health care, and the right of all people with disabilities to the full anti-discrimination protection of federal and provincial Human Rights Codes.

“Equality for people with disabilities was the only constitutional right added to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms during the widely publicized eighteen-month epic battle over the patriation of Canada’s Constitution, which lasted from October 1980 to April 1982,” writes Lepofsky. “It was won without any of the grassroots-organizing experience or the major technological tools that are today an indispensable part of the community organizer’s and disability advocate’s toolkit.”

Since Parliament adopted the Charter of Rights in 1982, many members of the disability community volunteered time lobbying, advocating, and campaigning to get the constitutional right to equality for people with disabilities effectively implemented. They won enactment of new legislation like the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act and similar laws at the federal level and in Manitoba, Nova Scotia, BC, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Few people know that equality for people with disabilities in Canada’s Charter of Rights was the product of grassroots action.

Apart from his role as the AODA Alliance Chair, the author David Lepofsky is the Visiting Research Professor of Disability Rights at the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario and visiting professor of disability rights at the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. He is He is also the Chair of the Special Education Advisory Committee of the Toronto District School Board.

This memoir is published in Volume 39 of the Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, the law journal of the Faculty of Law of the University of Windsor. It is “open source” and available for free for anyone to download and read.

How You Can Help

Download the memoir and encourage others to do so! Urge your friends and family to watch this interview. You can also promote it on social media, like X and Facebook.

Press members of the Ontario Legislature to watch this interview.

There have been 2,053 days, over five and a half years, since the Ford Government received the final report of the Independent Review of the implementation of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act by former Ontario Lieutenant Governor David Onley. There have been 466 days since the Ford Government received the final report of the AODA Independent Review conducted by Rich Donovan.

There are only 109 days until 2025, the deadline for Ontario to become accessible to 2.9 million Ontarians with disabilities. The Ford Government has announced no comprehensive plan of new action to fulfil its obligations under the AODA.

As much as ever, we welcome your feedback! Write the AODA Alliance, Chair David Lepofsky, at aodafeedback@gmail.com.